Argentina's last dictator sentenced to 20 years for Operation Condor crimes
Reynaldo Bignone, now 88, is already serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity

Tim Walker US Correspondent
@timwalker
12 hours ago

The last dictator of the infamous Argentine junta, Reynaldo Bignone, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for his involvement in Operation Condor, a conspiracy between South American governments to crush the Marxist movement during the 1970s and 1980s.

Operation Condor was launched in 1975 at a meeting of military intelligence chiefs from rival Latin nations including Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, who agreed to put aside their differences to combat what they saw as a leftist threat to their dominance of the continent. Left-wing campaigners were disappeared and killed across the region, including in Brazil, which later joined the operation, named for the South American vulture, as it continued into the next decade. Bignone was the final leader of Argentina’s military regime, ruling from 1982 to 1983.

Originally called School of the Americas, it was founded in 1946 and trained Latin American troops in anti-communist counterinsurgency. The school was rebranded as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in the early 2000s. Critics say people involved in torture, extrajudicial killings, and other violations of human rights got their training at the facility funded by US taxpayer money, with some labeling it School of Assassins.

The graduates of the school include Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, a CIA asset who was eventually ousted by the US in 1989; Roberto d’Aubuisson, a convicted drug trafficker and leader of the Salvadoran death squads suspected of torturing and killing thousands of civilians; Efrain Rios Montt, Guatemalan military dictator who stands accused of ordering the genocide of indigenous peoples.

Instruction manuals for the school released by the Pentagon in 1996 included references to torturing and executing insurgents.

A decade ago left-wing governments, defying Washington and global corporations, took power in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Venezuela, Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador. It seemed as if the tide in Latin America was turning. The interference by Washington and exploitation by international corporations might finally be defeated. Latin American governments, headed by charismatic leaders such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, won huge electoral victories. They instituted socialist reforms that benefited the poor and the working class. They refused to be puppets of the United States. They took control of their nations’ own resources and destinies. They mounted the first successful revolt against neoliberalism and corporate domination. It was a revolt many in the United States hoped to emulate here.

But the movements and governments in Latin America have fallen prey to the dark forces of U.S. imperialism and the wrath of corporate power. The tricks long practiced by Washington and its corporate allies have returned—the black propaganda; the manipulation of the media; the bribery and corruption of politicians, generals, police, labor leaders and journalists; the legislative coups d’état; the economic strangulation; the discrediting of democratically elected leaders; the criminalization of the left; and the use of death squads to silence and disappear those fighting on behalf of the poor. It is an old, dirty game.....

....Latin America looks set to be plunged once again into a period of dictatorial control and naked corporate exploitation. The governments of Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, which is on the brink of collapse, have had to fight off right-wing coup attempts and are enduring economic sabotage.

While the dates most associated with the Central Intelligence Agency are the 1953 coup against Iran’s Mohammed Mossadeq and the following year against Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, the world’s most notorious–and possibly ignoble–spy agency actually was chartered on this day, 18 September, in 1947.

Since then, the CIA has played a role in hundreds of assassinations, military coups, and rebellions around the globe, from Argentina to Zaire.

Despite it’s championing of freedom, the CIA’s true objective has always been imperialist in nature. Whether oil in Iran or bananas in Guatemala, the U.S. has a material interest in every country in whose affairs it has meddled.

In order to meet its goals, the CIA recruits influential, intellectual and charismatic personalities. The agency also resorts to threats, kidnappings, torture, enforced disappearances and assassinations. The organization incites violence, uprisings and military rebellion, and causes economic chaos and misery to the people through scarcity of basic foods, etc..

US President Barack Obama will send to his presidential archive a comprehensive Senate report on the Central Intelligence Agency's use of torture.

Obama ordered that the material remain classified for 12 years, read a letter from White House Counsel Neil Eggleston to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"At this time, we are not pursuing declassification of the full study," the letter said.

The Senate report confirmed in 2014 that the CIA employed brutal techniques like waterboarding, physical abuse, sleep deprivation, mock executions, and anal penetration performed under the cover of “rehydration” to interrogate terror suspects imprisoned after the September 11 attacks.http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/12...e-Barack-Obama

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when the people in power want you dead, just existing is a revolutionary act

New Operation Condor Files Show Terror, Torture in Argentina
Published 12 December 2016

According to the National Security Archive more files will be released as they are declassified even after Obama leaves office.

The administration of Barack Obama released Monday a declassified intelligence reports on Operation Condor, the 1970s covert efforts to rid U.S.-backed dictatorships of progressive opponents or to topple progressive governments outright in South America.

Washington D.C. September 9, 2016 – Forty-three years after the U.S.-supported military coup in Chile, the Central Intelligence Agency continues to withhold information on what it knew about planning for the putsch, and what intelligence it shared with President Richard Nixon, according to redacted documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The documents, among the hundreds of President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) the CIA declassified last month, excise material that almost certainly has already been released to the public years ago. The section on Chile of the PDB dated September 11, 1973, for example, was completely censored, as was an entire page on Chile provided to Nixon on September 8, 1973, even though thousands of once-sensitive intelligence records from the coup period have already been declassified since at least 1999.

“The CIA is trying – but failing – to hold history hostage,” stated Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive’s Chile Documentation Project. By continuing to censor the historical record, he suggested, “the CIA is attempting to cover up what Nixon knew about coup plotting in Chile and when he knew it, as well as hiding the CIA’s own contacts and connections to the coup plotters.”

New Files Reveal US Sold Argentina Military Aircraft to Dump Bodies in Ocean
Published 16 December 2016

Under the military dictatorship in Argentina, thousands of political opponents were drugged, tossed into aircraft and dumped in the ocean.

Declassified documents on Operation Condor reveal that the U.S. knew and assisted the Argentine dictatorship as it threw unconscious prisoners to their death in notorious “vuelos de la muerte,” or death flights.

Under the military dictatorship in Argentina, thousands of political opponents were drugged, tossed into aircraft and dumped in the Atlantic Ocean to drown.

Project Star Gate: CIA makes details of its psychic control plans public
The project looked to use 'remote viewing' and telekinesis as a weapon

Andrew Griffin
@_andrew_griffin
16 hours ago

The CIA has revealed details of its "Project Star Gate" mission to develop psychic abilities for the first time.

The revelations come as part of a huge dump of documents – almost 12 million in all – that are being made available on the internet. And they show the organisation's plans to harness the supernatural in ways that have never been seen before.

Project Star Gate, as it was known, was the codename for a US government project intended to use psychic and supernatural phenomenon for spying and military uses. In one of the pages, it lays out why the government wants to use it – the benefits include the fact that it is "passive", "inexpensive" and that there is "no known defense".http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...-a7534191.html

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when the people in power want you dead, just existing is a revolutionary act

Prophetically foreshadowing the current crisis (and apparent action plan), leaked CIA documents from the reign of Bashar al-Assad's father in the 1980s show a Washington Deep State plan coalescing to "bring real muscle to bear against Syria," toppling its leader (in favor of one amenable to US demands) , severing ties with Russia (its primary arms dealer), and paving the way for an oil and gas pipeline of Washington's choosing.

As ActivistPost.com's Brandon Turbeville detailed (just a day before Trump unleashed his Tomahawks), as the Syrian crisis enters its sixth year, the Donald Trump administration is looking more and more like the Obama administration every day. With the Trump regime refusing to open useful dialogue with Russia regarding Syria, its obvious anti-Iran and pro-Israel positioning, and support for a very questionable “safe zone” plan for Syria, the odds of a rational U.S. policy in regards to Syria has lower and lower odds of existence as time progresses.

Yet, despite the fact that the Trump administration is apparently poised to continue the Obama regime’s proxy war of aggression against the people of Syria, an example of seamless transition, it should also be remembered that the plan to destroy Syria did not begin with Obama but with the Bush administration.

Even now, as the world awaits the continuation of the Syrian war through a Democratic and Republican administration, the genesis of that war goes back to the Republican Bush administration, demonstrating that there is indeed an overarching agenda and an overarching infrastructure of an oligarchical deep state intent on moving forward regardless of which party is seemingly in power.http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-0...ent-crisis?utm

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when the people in power want you dead, just existing is a revolutionary act

Instead of being treated as the hero he truly was, Sgt. Terrance Yeakey was silenced by his own government in an effort to keep him from exposing their complicity in one of the largest mass murders in American history – which senselessly ended the lives of 168 people, including 19 children.

According to his widow, instead of being showered with accolades by the US government for his heroism, Yeakey was killed, with his death being framed to look like a suicide (although a very poorly staged one) only days before receiving the police department’s Medal of Valor for his heroic rescue efforts on day of the Oklahoma City bombing.

On May 11, 1996, only days after his Yeakey’s death, the New York Times ran a story with the headline – ‘A Policeman Who Rescued 4 in Bombing Kills Himself’ – but the bold assertion — that hero cop Sgt. Terrance Yeakey killed himself — couldn’t be further from the truth.

SAS deathsquads no doubt working from intelligence supplied by the CIA

The truth about SAS shoot-to-kill night raids, by the hero of 200 secret ops: Soldier breaks ranks to defend elite unit from witch-hunt but says illegal killings were ‘unwritten rule of our job’

A former SAS soldier has admitted to The Mail on Sunday that illegal killings were 'an unwritten rule of our job' but strongly defended the regiment's actions
His account comes after claims emerged that SAS members killed unarmed civilians in cold blood and falsified mission reports
He revealed how he took part in 200 night raids between 2010 and 2013, many investigated as potential war crimes by the RMP

By Mark Nicol for The Mail on Sunday
Published: 22:00, 8 July 2017 | Updated: 00:30, 9 July 2017

An SAS soldier has sensationally lifted the lid on the elite regiment’s controversial shoot-to-kill policy in Afghanistan – the subject of a multi-million pound investigation by military police.

The shocking allegations emerged as part of an investigation by the Royal Military Police (RMP) codenamed Operation Northmoor.

The battled-hardened soldier told how the central claims levelled against the SAS were flawed. He said:

Unarmed Afghans were routinely killed but only after high-level intelligence confirmed their identity as Taliban commanders rather than civilians;

Over a single year, the SAS’s D and G squadrons killed more than 600 enemy fighters, some of whom could have been captured. The soldier insisted there was no point taking prisoners because they would be released days after being handed over to the Afghan police;

In exceptional circumstances SAS troops did plant weapons on the bodies of unarmed Taliban commanders who had been killed – one of the central accusations levelled at the SAS – but said it was the only way they would be believed, even after gathering huge amounts of high-tech evidence to prove they were terrorists;

The SAS has also been accused of falsifying reports to make it appear friendly Afghan troops had shot Taliban fighters, rather than Special Forces soldiers. He admitted this happened but said it was because they had been ordered to exaggerate the involvement of the Afghan National Army for political reasons.

Speaking exclusively to this newspaper on condition of anonymity, the soldier revealed how he took part in 200 night raids between 2010 and 2013, many investigated as potential war crimes by the RMP.